T A B L E_.T A L K

Select your picks for the most tasteless advertising on television in the Television area of Table Talk

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R E C E N T L Y

Content's star shortage
By Harry Jaffe
Media watchdog Steve Brill tried -- and failed -- to get big-name media talent on his masthead
(06/12/98)

Source for Kathleen Willey story sues Newsweek's Michael Isikoff
By Joe Conason
Julie Steele claims reporter violated explicit agreement that their conversations were off the record
(06/12/98)

The truism show
By James Poniewozik
The op-ed-ization of Jim Carrey's new flick turns its anti-TV take into a rerun
(06/10/98)

Rolling Stone gathers no Marx
By David Weir
Rolling Stone is 30! Jann may have forgotten -- but a former contributor remembers the mag's semi-subversive mission
(06/09/98)

Making Magic
By Frank Sanello
Magic Johnson is beating AIDS -- now he wants to beat Leno and Letterman
(06/08/98)

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___________B E S T S E L L E R   H E L L
___[ We read 'em, so you don't have to ]

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Robin Cook's "Toxin" is a tale told by a hack, full of E. coli, signifying that the beef industry is the tool of Satan. Yum!

BY JON CARROLL | If there is any justice in the world, Robin Cook will be sued for beef libel by the same Texas cattlemen who tried to make Oprah Winfrey grovel for saying that she would never eat a hamburger again.

Oprah is a petty criminal in the fast-growing field of burger trash talk compared to Robin Cook. His new bestseller, "Toxin," informs its literally millions of readers that A) E. coli bacteria are common in ground beef products, B) undercooking of ground beef is routine in fast-food restaurants, C) said undercooking will lead beautiful little children who are figure skating champions to die grotesque deaths so that when their doctor fathers open their chests in a last-minute attempt to save them they discover that their hearts have turned to black jello, D) the reaction of the cattlemen to the deaths of beautiful little children is to, say, hire a hit man to kill the USDA inspector who's monitoring the slaughterhouse and hire another hit man to murder the doctor father, meanwhile E) continuing to buy feces-cloaked sick cows from hillbilly entrepreneurs who know there's easy money to be made at the back door of any slaughterhouse.

There's not even the obligatory conscience-stricken rancher to say, "Wait, don't you think this insane pursuit of profit has gone on long enough?" We have your basic Beef Industry as a Tool of Satan bestselling thriller. To drive the point home, we have several key scenes in the slaughterhouse featuring the hero and villain literally thigh-deep in offal wrestling for a pistol. Ooops, there it goes into a pile of shit! Who'll dive for it? Read this with a friend.

So it may be said that Cook is doing a public service by introducing this topic into the general public discourse. It's not exactly Upton Sinclair, but "Toxin" is clearly a polemic, written by someone so secure in the pantheon of bestseller Valhalla that he has no need of controversy to move a million or so units of his latest book. So we thank him, we informed and cheerful online readers, for taking the trouble to bring us the answer to so many questions we didn't know we had, like: What do they do with the heads?

Answer: Hose 'em down and put the face sludge in with the burger meat. Is your Big Mac a little cheeky? So another trial might bring even more publicity to the E. coli problem. Might get the chattering classes going on it, might get the surgeon general involved. But also: Such a trial would be an incredible nuisance to Robin Cook, and that would make me glad. I think he deserves to suffer just a little. "Toxin" is another example of the barely written, barely proofread big popular books that are plaguing this nation. They are the E. coli of the chain bookstores, apparently wholesome products that deliver the literary equivalent of eyeball sludge.

Only someone like me, required to read these books as a condition of my occasional column here, is able to sound the tocsin. Things are getting worse. It may be that the overall quality of books on the bestseller list is rising slightly -- I could make that case -- but the overall quality of the big bad books is getting worse.

"Toxin" reads like a first draft. One might be cynical enough to wonder whether Robin Cook, the infinitely franchisable human, had anything to do with the writing. Perhaps he did an outline and hired a three-human team to grind out a book, straight fee, no commissions, full gag order built into the contract. I don't know if that happened here, but it is not uncommon -- I know starving writers who've done that sort of thing. Increasingly, writers get out of writing as soon as they're rich enough. The author (let's be generous) may have a genuine passion for public health issues, but he cares not a whit about his characters, nor about his prose. It is obvious that no one cares about the prose -- the editor of the book undoubtedly spent time fretting about marketing campaigns. Raised letters on the cover? Maybe little holes in the dust jacket? Red! Red is a good color. Two quotes. First, our hit man appears: "Carlos was a dark-haired, dark-complected wiry man with multiple flamboyant tattoos on both arms. His face was dominated by bushy eyebrows, a pencil-line mustache, and hollow cheeks. His eyes were like black marbles."

One tip to budding writers: Unless you're writing a police report, the word "complected" is usually a tip-off that you need to start again. Also, a face is small -- it's hard to have it dominated by three things. And those black marbles ... never mind.

When Carlos learns that his victim is "an attractive, tall blonde who's about twenty-five," his face "twists into a grin of pleasure." I mean.

Later, the heroic doctor and his heroic ex-wife (they are brought together by feces contamination) are about to undertake a dangerous spy mission. They are sneaking up to the slaughterhouse. The atmosphere is tense. The doctor whispers, "Allowing meat irradiation is just an invitation for the industry to allow that much more contamination to get in during processing in the hopes that it will all be killed by gamma rays at the end. You'll notice even with irradiation the industry insists the onus is on the consumers to handle and cook the meat in a way the industry considers proper."

Whenever I break into an industrial plant, I try to use the word "onus." Breaks the tension.
SALON | June 16, 1998